The most idiotic thing being said about
America's involvement in Afghanistan is that the best way to protect
the 68,000 U.S. troops there now is by putting an additional 40,000 in
harm's way.
People who argue for that plan clearly
have not read Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's report pushing for
escalation. The general is as honest as he is wrong in laying out the
purpose of this would-be expanded mission, which is to remold
Afghanistan in a Western image by making U.S. troops far more
vulnerable, rather than less so.
He is honest in arguing that American
troops would have to be deployed throughout the rugged and otherwise
inhospitable terrain of rural Afghanistan, entering intimately into the
ways of local life so as to win the hearts and minds of a people who
clearly wish we would not extend the favor. He is wrong in indicating,
without providing any evidence to support the proposition, that this
very costly and highly improbable quest to be the first foreign power
to successfully model life in Afghanistan would be connected with
defeating the al-Qaida terrorists.
As the president's top national security
adviser has stated, there are fewer than 100 al-Qaida members left in
Afghanistan and they have no capacity to launch attacks. These remnants
of a foreign Arab force assembled by the U.S. to thwart the Soviets in
their hapless effort to conquer Afghanistan are now alienated from the
locally based insurgency.
As Matthew Hoh, the former Marine captain
and foreign service officer in charge of the most contested area, said
recently in his letter of resignation, we have stumbled into a
35-year-long civil war between rural people "who want to be left alone"
and a corrupt urban government that the U.S. insists on backing. Hoh,
who quit after a decade of service in Iraq and Afghanistan, wrote that
he was resigning not because of the hardships of his assignment but
rather because he no longer believed in its stated purpose:
"... [I]n the course of my five months of service in Afghanistan ... I
have lost understanding and confidence in the strategic purposes of the
United States' presence in Afghanistan. ... To put simply: I fail to see
the value or the worth in continued U.S. casualties or expenditures of
resources in support of the Afghan government in what is, truly, a
35-year old civil war. ... Like the Soviets, we continue to secure and
bolster a failing state, while encouraging an ideology and system of
government unknown and wanted by its people. ... I have observed that the
bulk of the insurgency fights not for the white banner of the Taliban,
but rather against the presence of foreign soldiers and taxes imposed
by an unrepresentative government in Kabul."
Just how unrepresentative was amply
demonstrated in a very low-turnout election which the U.S.-backed
candidate, Hamid Karzai, won after stealing one-third of the ballots he
claimed for his victory, according to U.N. observers. In a message of
congratulation to Karzai, President Barack Obama made reference to the
need for reform and an end to the corruption that is endemic in the
Karzai regime but then stated, "Although the process was messy, I am
pleased to say that the final outcome was determined in accordance with
Afghan law, which I think is very important."
What law? A runoff was avoided only when
Karzai refused to accede to his opponent's demand for changes in the
election commission that had stuffed the ballot boxes.
When Bob Schieffer of CBS said of the
election "the thing was a fraud," White House senior adviser David
Axelrod had the arrogance to defend the rigged process as having
"proceeded in the constitutional way." Just what is it we are telling
the world about our belief in the integrity of elections? It is no
different from our having extolled those garbage elections that
occurred with great regularity in Vietnam during the war there, a point
made to great effect by Hoh:
"Our support for this kind of government,
coupled with a misunderstanding of the insurgency's true nature,
reminds me horribly of our involvement with South Vietnam; an unpopular
and corrupt government we backed at the expense of our Nation's own
internal peace, against an insurgency whose nationalism we arrogantly
and ignorantly mistook as a rival to our own Cold War ideology."
Obama must know the truth of those words
and should heed them before he marches down the disastrous path pursued
by another Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson-who, we now know from
his White House telephone tapes, sacrificed the youth of this country
in a war that he always knew never made sense.